OK. I’ve been tagged by a couple of folks to list 10 books that have been influential in my life. Here goes: 1. Truth in Comedy: The Manual for Improvisation by Del Close, Charna Halpern and Kim Howard Johnson – This book introduced my college improve troupe to longform. It was the only book on longform improv at the time. I moved to Chicago because of this book. 2. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey – I read this shortly after becoming a father. A principled guide on how to be a person that doesn’t rely on the supernatural or argument from tradition alone. Sound advice throughout, and the brief section on empathetic listening should be mandatory for every human. 3. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond – A Pulitzer Prize winning look at the factors that contribute to the success or failure of a culture. Diamond argues geography and physical factors plays a primary role. 4. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell – Similar to Guns, Germs and Steel, but looking more at individual success. Many of the heroic narratives we love give a less clear (and accurate) understanding of what drives success. This was a paradigm shifting book for me. 5. Why Everyone (else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind by Robert Kurzban I read a fair amount of popular cognitive science books. Kurzban’s book highlighted the modular nature of the brain, the fact that different parts of the brain evolved to do specific tasks, and that we should remove any expectation that there is “someone” in there making a holistic big picture from the pieces. 6. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein – A really informative book that deals with how we can solve social problems while retaining freedom of choice by structuring the choice architecture for optimal outcomes. 7. Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow by Daniel Kahneman – Nobel Laureate and father of Behavioral Economics (the bold idea that the science of economics should describe actual human behavior) wrote his magnum opus. A really thorough, albeit somewhat academic, look at fast & slow thinking, how it serves us, and how it leads us astray. If you want to know how your brain works, this is a good primer. 8. TIE: Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them by Joshua Greene and The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Johnathan Haidt – Both really wonderful books about how our brains create moral judgements, what it means for conflict resolution across moral lines, and (in the case of Greene’s book) a pretty solid case for Utilitarianism as the moral philosophy compatible with our cognitive toolkit. 9. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller – I read this after moving to Amsterdam (back when I was reading primarily fiction). A smart, sharp dissection of bureaucracy and the insanity of war. 10. Getting Even by Woody Allen- The Gossage Vardebedian papers is one of the best things ever written. Perfect comedy.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 18:08:17 +0000
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